1 Language in the World How does language relate to the non-linguistic world? If an agent is able to communicate linguistically and is also able to directly perceive and/or act on the world, how do perception, action, and language interact with and influence each other? Such questions are surely amongst the most important in Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Language, after all, is a central aspect of the human mind – indeed it may be what distinguishes us from other species. There is sometimes a tendency in the academic world to study language in isolation, as a formal system with rules for well-constructed sentences; or to focus on how language relates to formal notations such as symbolic logic. But language did not evolve as an isolated system or as a way of communicating symbolic logic; it presumably evolved as a mechanism for exchanging information about the world, ultimately providing the medium for cultural transmission across generations. Motivated by these observations, the goal of this special issue is to bring together research in AI that focuses on relating language to the physical world. Language is of course also used to communicate about non-physical referents, but the ubiquity of physical metaphor in language [21] suggests that grounding in the physical world provides the foundations of semantics.

Abstract. Natural Language Generation (nlg) systems generate texts in English and other human languages from non-linguistic input data. Usually there are a large number of possible texts that can communicate the input data, and nlg systems must choose one of these. We argue that style can be used by nlg systems to choose between possible texts, and explore how this can be done by (1) explicit stylistic parameters, (2) imitating a genre style, and (3) imitating an individual’s style. 1